The need for mobile apps for businesses is much more than maintaining an online presence. It is a source to generate massive revenues, expanding the customer base, generating new business prospects, reinforcing brand image, etc. Everybody has something to offer and thus, in such a dog-fight, it is extremely necessary for businesses to lure customers in different ways to ensure their retention and loyalty towards their service and brand. When the user is concerned, it is not the technicality of the app that counts. It is the features and the interface of the app that makes the difference to the user, which decides its fate and in turn the fate of the company. Thus, it is important that user engagement should be given top most priority and with this mindset, the UI/UX of the app should be designed so that the user never feels the need to opt for another app. Let’s delve into the basics of UI/UX of mobile apps and how it helps in customer retention.

What is UI? : A User Interface (UI) is the space where a human and a machine interacts with each other. The medium of interaction depends on the environment that constitutes the individual and the machine. When mobile phones and humans interact with each other, the interaction takes place through a Graphical User Interface (GUI). The GUI is not restricted only to the tabs and navigation menu in an app. In fact, the entire functioning of the app depends upon it.

What is UX? : A User Experience (UX), as the name suggests, is the experience a user has while using the app. Their emotions and behavior when using the app account for this. It comprises of pragmatic, worthy, meaningful facets of human – mobile app interaction. A flawless UX guarantees the return and loyalty of a consumer. Developing UX of an app involves a lot of research, analysis of user behavior, a rock solid planning and many other things.

Now that we have a brief idea about what a UI/UX is, let’s discuss some of its vital components below.

Usual Suspects: The most basic requirements to make an app appealing, is the use of understandable or at least familiar symbols, icons, tabs, etc. This makes the user feel at home and familiar with functionalities of those elements. The colour schemes and themes for the app should not repel the user. For instance, a smooth and bright colour scheme makes the user happy. Also, whilst these things are paid attention to, users should also be given the freedom to customize the look of the app according to their will and mood. This makes the user feel special.

Keep The Confusions At Bay: While creating an app, the prime focus should be on the simplicity of the design. An app’s UI should be self-explanatory and just in case your app is overloaded with features, make sure to include a small app tour in the beginning. This makes users familiar with your app and enables them to use its functions and features with ease.

Lags & Jitters Are For Losers: The last thing an app’s UI should do is to bog down the speed of the user’s device. A user would opt for anything but, an app that slows down or freezes his device. To ensure a faster UI, the app should shed excess load. The smaller the size of the app, the faster it is. It should also be duly noted that the app should be swift when working online. An app that takes time load even when the device has access to a fast internet connection, has some defects and needs to be checked and corrected on a priority basis.

Consistency:An app should maintain its consistency when the user navigates from one page to another. The layout should almost replicate itself so that a user doesn’t encounter a major change. It makes the user familiar with new pages of the app and helps him in efficiently navigating through the app and the new functions that he comes across.

Conclusion: UI is what a user first comes across, and his return and loyalty to your app and brand depends entirely upon his experience and interaction with the app. It is important for businesses to preserve and expand their customer base and although, technical aspects are important, the UI/UX of the app can’t be ignored as that is the driving force for customer retention.

About Techugo: We’re a mobile app development companyand we develop mobile apps for businesses customized to their needs. We realize that UI/UX forms an essential component of the mobile app development process and hence, our development process especially focuses on the look and feel of the app apart from the technical specification to provide users with an overall satisfying experience.

Technology is beautiful and has unfolded any unknown and yet to be discovered aspects on us. We enjoy, relish and somehow have gone addicted to its inevitable fragrance. Technology has made us utilize certain aspects, on which we are completely dependent and can’t imagine our life without it, one of such is Google Map, whether it is to chase a new destination, feel lost on the way or even discovering the new ways to reach, it is the Google Map, which always lead the way for us. Technology always comes with a price which we have to pay either through our addiction or the errors it causes, as a relief it is more in the number of addictions and ironically, it is always the technology which comes for our rescue in the form of regular updates.

The updates in the mobile apps are nothing new to experience, but at times the updates open a new chapter in the book of innovation for the end user. This exactly has happened the same way with the Google Map, which has received the updates for the further betterment. I scrolled down the tech news and one piece of news caught my attention was something related to Google Map, I got more inclined to read it further, since with Google Map I share a daily relationship from home to work and vice versa. It has become my trained chauffeur, informing me about the shortcut, traffic and many other interesting facts related to my daily to and fro. The recent update has indeed brought many new features to this app, let’s discuss and elaborate further:

What Is Google Map

Although it’s a very insane to put a heading ‘what is Google map’, but just to satiate some hungry brains of those who are still new to Google Map and its functionalities, this is a much needed explanation. Google map is a search engine for you to search out the streets, roads, nearby shops & traffic and an interesting appetizer for your local business to increase the productivity. It is a location based service and helps you anywhere and at any point of time.

What is The New Update All About

The new Google Map update is all about speeding up your journey. This specific update is dedicated to iOS app users, which includes latest software updates, coupled with certain new and exciting features and also the bug fixes. The one of the most prominent feature this update has received is the addition of 3D Touch shortcuts. The 3D Touch update is all set to make your journey much faster and much earlier.

How Does It Work

On updating Google map on your iOS device, the 3D Touch to any location on the map would expedite the action and any location marked on the map would launch faster. The 3D touch is the brain child of Apple with iPhone 6S, which let the various responses to occur depending on the amount of pressure marked on the screen, henceforth making the iPhone 6S, 6S Plus, iPhone 7, or 7 Plus, noteworthy platforms to quickly launch the Google Map functionalities at a much faster speed.

With the new Google Map update, you can relish the 3D Touch more beautifully and a menu of useful shortcuts can be created with a pressure on the iOS icon on the Home Screen. You can add an abundance of interesting features in the hidden menu, such as fast access to Directions to Work, and Directions to Home. You can also get a short summary of the latest travel conditions around your current location.

You can create the list quite simply with Google Maps, and tap on the place you want to include, followed by a tap on the new “Save” icon. Within this you can save and store the location to one of several pre-made lists, such as ‘Favorites’ or ‘Want to Go’. You can also create your own customized list and name it anything of your preference and share with your friends via text, email, social networks and other apps and make it sound more personalized.

The other exciting feature the new Google Map update has to offer is that users can follow the lists made by other Google Maps users, which means any new club or restaurant opened in your vicinity, you will remain updated.

To use the new features of Google Map, are highly convenient to use, you may take a look at the saved places, by opening the Google Maps side menu, and tapping on ‘Your Places’, which will display all your saved locations on the map. Your saved preferences would be available to all mobile and desktop devices, and can even be checked offline.

In a nutshell, Google map update is a true enjoyable experience, you only need to check and mark the difference. If you also have a concept to get a mobile app for your business and integrate the location based services within it, you certainly need an expert’s advice on it, and Techugo is proud to offer its services for your app development process and be your app development partner.

At Techugo, we take pride in developing the mobile apps for the leading brands to startups and our mobile app development team has the expertise to create a unique variety of mobile app solution for your business needs, which would help you to showcase your idea, goal and dream in the most informative and engaging way. Our team of top mobile app designers is here to help assist you with every step of your mobile app development strategy. We consult, brainstorm, manage the project, design, develop, test, launch, and market apps in the best possible way.

You can get in touch with our team to discuss further your concept to bring into reality. The discussion would help you to gain a better insight of your app requirement.

My current company Techugo- a top mobile app development company, has robust working structure, which gives the equal and fair chance to every employee to go and grab the chance of being a face of the company in front of the client, so it was my day, when I had been given this opportunity, which I accepted with a grinning smile. Although I am very extrovert by nature, but it was a Fri evening and we had a video conference with our overseas client, being new to the organization, it was but obvious for me to get all the butterflies of the world to come and get accumulated in my tiny stomach and I was feeling to throw up due to nervousness, but had to remain calm and quiet and pose as relaxed as possible. The only question from my CTO Preeti Singh, “Gunjan , all ready?”, brought me into the frame of the Monalisa portrait made by Leonardo DA Vinci. I can laugh at my situation now when I am writing, but a month ago this situation was gruesome for me and I wanted to remain invisible…Well the meeting started and I was introduced to our client, my name ‘Gunjan Manral’ is not as tough to pronounce or maybe this was a mere thought of mine only, since our client repeated my name as ‘Gooojan Menrahl’, although he was told again but he couldn’t attain the correct pronunciation, so in order not to annoy him further, we decided to let the meeting move on, no prize for guessing for the next few days I was tried with my patience, since my colleagues kept on calling my name with the same pronunciation.

This all is quite much obvious when an Asian name is usually being pronounced by native English speakers, but when your name is also pronounced as “Gooojan” by Google Assistant, then you feel little helpless to curb the antics of your friends. A machine is expected to work according to your desire, but unfortunately, the advancement of technology has reached the extreme, but yet in mobile technology, a most common problem faced among all voice assistant is they sound unnatural and the pronunciation of names are almost suicidal. But Google has come up with a solution to fix the issue of mispronunciation of your name through two different techniques…quite a reliever isn’t it…yes, and especially for me, it is…so let’s know those two different ways to escape you from being mortified in front of your friends and colleagues.

Way 1 : Your Nickname

As a child, you are called with different and lovely diminutives, which sound so ecstatic and cute during the childhood, but sooner you cross that stage, such names are not always sooth down your ears. I too have a nickname, and fortunately very cute still, so without divulging the name, I would like to talk about the process. With Google assistant you can set your nickname (if you still like it) to be used, it is easier for the technology to grab the shortened form of your name, you can follow the process:

Open the Google Home app on Android or iOS

Click on More settings

Click on Personal Info

Click Nickname

Enter your nickname

Tap Play to test out the pronunciation

Now, all the time Google Assistant would address you by name, either through Google Home or Assistant on Pixel phones, but it will be that short and cute name filled by you.

Way 2: Phonetic Pronunciation

If you are not willing to pick your nickname, then there is one other way for you, that is Phonetic Spelling of your name. Phonetic chart sound more like a V&A practice made in the call center, but it is not, rather it would help the Google to understand your name through the phonetic spelling and it would never be wrong. Let’s learn how to do it:

In the above-mentioned menu option

Click on the option to spell out how your name

Click the radio button to the left of Spell it out.

Here type the phonetic spelling of your name, using English alphabets only

Click the blue Play button to test it

You must add spaces to break up the syllable and carry out the exact functioning of the syllable stress, like for my name, I would spell it: Goon-Jan.

This technology was earlier available with Cortana on Windows and Siri on Mac, but with Google, you can imply this technique in two different ways, as per your convenience. Google indeed has brought relief to many like me, who want to keep their name to be pronounced clearly. On the other hand, I am an Android app developerwith Techugo, worth to mention, if you want your Android app development concept to get the wings of reality then Techugo is the right destination for you.

At Techugo, we take pride in developing the mobile apps for the leading brands to startups and our mobile app development team has the expertise to create a unique variety of mobile app solution for your business needs, which would help you to showcase your idea, goal, and dream in the most informative and engaging way. Our team of top mobile app designers is here to help assist you with every step of your mobile app development strategy. We consult, brainstorm, manage the project, design, develop, test, launch, and market apps in the best possible way.

You can get in touch with our team to discuss further your concept to bring into reality. The discussion would help you to gain a better insight of your app requirement.

Mobile apps are getting wildly popular, so the competition is rising at a heating speed. To make a mobile app sustain in the app stores, you need to opt for a more robust app marketing strategy. App marketing does not limit to a particular segment, but is a vast method and content marketing, is the most significant part of app marketing, it can surface out to description content, image content, video content, user review content…and more and more. Content marketing can be proven quite effective, if planned and initiated much before the launch of the mobile app.

Why Content Marketing

Content marketing is a proven technique. It includes app-related blogs, news, video content, infographics, podcasts, guides, slides, ebooks and white papers and any other type of content. With the right pieces of content ready at the right time to fit your content marketing strategy, you can make people aware of your upcoming app product and will get it noticed by the targeted customers and it will make you appear to be an expert in your field and you would have the appropriate users available to download and engage with your app beforehand. SEO and content marketing complement each other so well and the content can be shared via social media and encourage your targeted audience to share your content with others. As an app marketer, you always look for new users for your app, to make it functional you need to plan your content in a way to make it an exceptional piece so it can leave a positive print on your reader’s mind and they would rely more on your services.

Content marketing is a proven technique. It includes app-related blogs, news, video content, infographics, podcasts, guides, slides, ebooks and white papers and any other type of content. With the right pieces of content ready at the right time to fit your content marketing strategy, you can make people aware of your upcoming app product and will get it noticed by the targeted customers and it will make you appear to be an expert in your field and you would have the appropriate users available to download and engage with your app beforehand. SEO and content marketing complement each other so well and the content can be shared via social media and encourage your targeted audience to share your content with others. As an app marketer, you always look for new users for your app, to make it functional you need to plan your content in a way to make it an exceptional piece so it can leave a positive print on your readers mind and they would rely more on your services.

How To Do It

App marketing can be performed through various ways and many benefits can be availed from content marketing. It aides to app downloads, with the app store link or app landing page link in the content, it will encourage the users to download the app. You can be more creative with content and come up with something that will attract the audience. To know the content marketing strategies, you can select your distribution channels carefully and your target audience for each of the following content marketing options:

Social Media Channels

Social media channels are the top-selling marketing plan to distribute your content and build a good level of social media engagement. While distributing your content via social media, write interesting and short posts to encourage your users to share the content with others.

Email Marketing Content

Email marketing is a content strategy to be followed, which has various interesting features, you can share oodles of content with your users, like videos, screenshots, blog articles, user reviews, etc. Make it a mobile-friendly template for the ease of the users and make sure that the content would deliver the value.

Guest Blogging

Guest blogging is an interesting initiative to call for external bloggers to post their blog content. Guest blogging is free but is posted once found original and useful, you can hire an expert content writer as well, and who can write app related blogs to get your app higher exposure.

AdWords Content

With AdWords, you need to play safe about the content of your display ads and the content of your landing pages. The landing pages must call directly to download the app along with supporting content such as user reviews, screenshots, and videos. Adwords, help you to analyze the data for mobile user acquisition and engagement.
If you are curious enough to know more about App Marketing, You can get in touch with our team to discuss further your mobile app concept to bring into reality. The discussion would help you to gain a better insight of your app requirement and will help you market your app with appropriate app marketing strategies.

You can get in touch with our team to discuss further your mobile app concept to bring into reality. The discussion would help you to gain a better insight of your app requirement and will help you market your app with appropriate app marketing strategies.

You can reach us at: sales@techugo.comSkype: aks141Skype: ankit.techugo

Search is a relevant marketing channel, which makes a distinctive marking for the business, between the overhead costs and a potential and targeted traffic ready to buy. SEO-search engine optimization stands for whispering the life to your business by making it available to the public through the best practices implemented by the SEO officer. The best practices help the business improving the site rankings in the search results. This typically involves optimizing the content to improve their relevance and building quality links to those pages.

Why SEO Is Needed

As per the recent survey conducted by top software listing companies; 90% of consumers read reviews before visiting a business, 31% of customers are likely to spend 31% more on a business with excellent reviews and 72% of consumers will take action only after reading a positive review, which means reviews can boost the results by using fresh user-generated content, ultimately explain the another KRA of SEO. We have calculated few key factors of SEO, which makes it, remain an effective marketing channel for the business.

More Consumers Now Use Search Engines

Extremely Cost Effective

Generates Highly Targeted Traffic

In the last , SEO Is Not A Cost But An Investment

SEO Benefits

Apart from the above-mentioned points, there are various more benefits, which business receives from the SEO. As reviewers are the buyers, the regular flows of reviews do help attain the targeted traffic through the right keywords, coming directly from the customers. Google considers the rating of sites and always favors the highest ratings, so an improved review helps the business.

Key Points Affect SEO

Unfortunately, there are a few key points, which affect SEO drastically and make the SEO job a little tedious to achieve popularity. Here is the list of those factors, which affect the development decisions for the SEO:

Website

SEO job can lose its basic essence if the website of your products is responsive only on desktop screen not on any other device. If the website seems perfect only to the desktop, then the business may lose a big and a potential chunk of business. When we talk about getting a website for our business, what we clearly mean and hint that website should be designed with a technique which can let the website to adapt to any size screen, and off course, the content must fit into the size making it readable and easy to navigate. A website needs to be responsive on various device else the business can extinct easily since business needs to be mobile-friendly making it easier to scale on the ranking pattern. Users leave a negative review of the product if the user experience gets affected by the unresponsive website. A responsive website, help the business to be accessed on any device as per the user’s convenience.

Meta Tags

Meta tags are the shortest form of text that explains the entire page’s content on an elaborated term, they are incorporated in the page’s code within an opening and closing head tags of the code. These tags play a vital and very crucial role in search engine glossary and help users to get a summarized idea of what your site is about and what exactly your keywords are. There is no rocket science required to implement these tags, but anyone with the basic HTML knowledge can be implemented.

Website Hosting

Undoubtedly, choosing the right web hosting company doesn’t assure a rankings boost for the business, but it does certainly lead to favorable consequences. Web hosting needs to be picked very sincerely and must not be considered as the pricing factor only; else it could translate into a slow loading website and reduced page speed. As a conclusion, you ought to be more cautious when choosing a company to host your website.

SEO is an incredibly powerful tool in current marketing perspective but at the same time, it does not catapult your business to the heights of success within a day. Albeit, quite a many other factors, apart from mentioned in this blog, also contribute to optimizing the search engine rankings. To improve the site’s rankings, a long and fruitful strategy should be addressed by the SEO officers to make long lasting and productive changes for the business owners.

“You can get in touch with our team to discuss further your concept to bring into reality. The discussion would help you to gain a better insight of your app requirement.”

Google Penguin 4.0 update is the hottest news in the tech world these days, though Google has launched Penguin much earlier than expected launch date. To make the task much easier, let us explain what Google Penguin 4.0 is all about. Google Penguin is basically a code name for a Google algorithm update announced on April 24, 2012, aiming at decreasing the SEO rankings of websites that violate Google’s Webmaster Guidelines and penalizing websites that use various black-hat link schemes to manipulate search rankings. As per the Google’s estimates, Penguin affects approximately 3.1% of search queries in English, about 3% of queries in languages like German, Chinese, and Arabic, and an even bigger percentage of them in “highly spammed” languages.

Google Penguin Update- Introduction

Google Penguin was first announced on April 24, 2012, with a wonderful outbreak to the SEO practitioners and digital marketers to perform their SEO research in a perfect way. The prime concern of Penguin Update is to combat spam link strategies and keeping a tight watch on the quality of website links. Many sites who have been fidgeting with the guidelines have got a strict check and almost vanished from search results.

Why It Is Needed

Google Penguin has been a robust tool for marketing and has yielded enough appreciation for the job. Although Google has always made the required changes in the Penguin, but Penguin 4.0 launched on September 23rd, 2016 is little different from its last update versions, such as Penguin 2.0 and Penguin 3.0 , since it is a real-time algorithm, which would make the algorithm always be “on” and updating. Undoubtedly, Penguin 4.0 is a relief for the digital marketing community to nail it on the head; it will get a neck-hold on spam link profiles more quickly and would add the sites to rank appropriately in the Google search results.

How It Works

SEO is the key driver to optimize business links to support initiatives that will contribute to the goals and success of client business. The practice of appropriate link audits and disavows are crucially significant to give an instant boost to a business. Through Penguin 4.0 Google alerts the SEO analyst to examine the links with the Disavow Tool, to understand the functionality and authentication of the source of the links and links can be removed or not to follow the links.

If you also want to rank first on the search engine page for your business domain, you get in touch with our experienced and dedicated team of web developers and SEO experts and create a unique and mesmerizing web solution for your business or simply revamp your existing website, feel free to contact us and the discussion would help you to gain a better insight of your business requirement.